Knowing
by Atheniandream
Summary: After two hundred years, Rukia Kuchki knows many things.


_. . . . _

**_Knowing_**

_By Atheniandream_

_. . . . . _

_Don't you know I'm no good for you_

_I've learned to lose you, can't afford to_

_Tore my shirt to stop you bleedin'_

_But nothin' ever stops you leavin'_

_Quiet when I'm coming home and I'm on my own_

_I could lie, say I like it like that, like it like that_

_I could lie, say I like it like that, like it like that_

_Don't you know too much already_

_I'll only hurt you if you let me_

_Call me friend but keep me closer (Call me back)_

_And I'll call you when the party's over_

_Quiet when I'm coming home and I'm on my own_

_And I could lie, say I like it like that, like it like that_

_Yeah I…_

'_When the Party's Over' By Billie Eillish_

_. . . . _

_. . . . _

After two hundred years, Rukia Kuchki knows many things.

She knows what it's like to plummet headfirst from one difficult existence to the next. To die an infant, fragile and unprotected, only to be thrown into the gauntlet of impoverished childhood and circumstantial ambiguity. Both times without a family to fall back on.

She knows what it's like to marry her best friend; the one that followed her out of the dark and into the light. To live and breathe nearly every single day next to someone who can feel the rhythm of her heartbeat in her moods and the importance of any simple look. The kind of person who has your back no matter what, and who never judges your secrets, no matter how big or small they may be.

She knows what it's like to go from being the poor outsider, only to be swept up into aristocracy just to feel like she's on the outside looking in. To carry the burden of lineage and yet still seem like the most streetwise one in a room full of mostly entitled idiots. She exists on the wrong side of a divide no matter where she stands. No matter how you look at it. She has learnt to toe the line expertly, over the years.

She knows what it's like to have a child, and fear for the life of that tiny person, even though she knows that they are already dead. To raise them and learn about them and help them develop, and never really get to know the person they may have been before. She's never understood the spirit world in that regard, and sometimes it scares her. _If most of them existed before this point, then surely they all must have? _

She knows what it's like to miss a sister that you barely remember; to step into their life like an awkward doppelganger and still struggle to understand what it means to miss them long after they've come and gone. To witness the destruction that their passing has laid behind it, in the broken eyes of her adopted brother and keeper, in watching him take a step into every day without his dear love beside him.

She knows friendship in its truest form. The camaraderie of coworker relations and those precious few that bleed into her life, both Soul Reaper and human alike. She knows she is luckier than most that she can seek solace in the care of others. People who would lay down their life for her, and have done often.

And she knows deep guilt. To end the life of someone that you loved. To take someone you held so precious to the world, completely out of it in the sharp blink of an eye and the quick slash of a katana. She realises, after much reflection, as the years had started to stack up, that Kaien was her childhood love. Her first love. He would forever be the person that she had idolised; looked up to and in the end, the one forever broken part of her psyche. He is a wound that can only heal in time. And not one to be quickly dismissed from her heart.

_Rukia knows many things, indeed. _

But there is one piece missing. Something that has slipped out of her grasp. One thing that she has yet been able to experience.

As the years pile up, decades mounting around her with a speed that her soul refuses to lie down for, she has come to the realisation that no matter how lucky she may be - _and boy has she been lucky, far and above most in her world_ \- no matter all the things that have come to pass thus far,

_Rukia Kuchki does not know..._

_What it is like to kiss the man that __she may very well be in love with__._

But she waits regardless, her heart beating with a timelessness, a rhythm that she thinks only he can hear.

Because she knows just one more thing.

_Only one, but the most important thing of all._

_**She knows that Ichigo Kurosaki is on his **_**_way to her._**

And when he finally arrives,

She will be right there, at the gates of the Seireitei.

And beside him, once again.

. . .

. .

.

_**Author's Notes:**_

_Just something little. But, oh my god, I can't even. It's just like me to fall from my biggest ship after they become almost canon, right head long first into another. And boy, is there something timeless about these two. Rukia Kuchki is bottomless in her emotional reach, and Ichigo is...the boy turned man that we all loved once, who etched into our hearts with such sweet passing._


End file.
